With several big data initiatives announced Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Governor Deval Patrick said he wants to make the state a hub for big data research.

A recent coding competition in the Boston area brought together IT professionals, medical workers and others with an interest in health IT to show how data analytics can improve health care.

About two years ago, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield implemented a self-service business intelligence platform to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple repositories scattered throughout the company.

SAP seems to be betting its future on its HANA in-memory database, spotlighting the technology once again at the Sapphire conference in Orlando Wednesday, announcing a slew of new applications, partnerships and functional enhancements for the system.

The market for software related to the Hadoop and MapReduce programming frameworks for large-scale data analysis will jump from $US77 million in 2011 to $US812.8 million in 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 60.2 per cent, according to a new report released by analyst firm IDC.

Tibco has brought its Spotfire in-memory analytics software into the burgeoning ecosystem around Hadoop, an open-source framework for processing large sets of information, the company announced Tuesday.

IBM today came out with its first iteration of the analytics software package that it expects will help law enforcement, government agencies and private businesses wade through the massive amounts of data they collect to help them predict, disrupt and prevent criminal, terrorist and fraudulent activities.

SAP's technology chief has given a strong rebuttal to a recent presentation by an Oracle executive that was critical of SAP's HANA in-memory database, saying it is full of "falsehoods."

In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

Managing data isn't as glamorous as many of the glitzy Web 2.0 apps on display at the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, but it's what keeps businesses running. Enterprise applications to speed databases, manage unstructured data, and handle BI queries on a massive scale made their debut this week, and at first blush they look positive. Of course, all will have to stand the rigor of real-world use and testing.